Prof. Christine Walker Awarded AHRC Grant to Research Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Material Culture

Dr. Christine Walker has been awarded a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant (U.K.) with her co-PI, Dr. Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University) to undertake research for a project entitled “Material culture and consumption in eighteenth-century Jamaica.”

Much has been written about Jamaica’s plantation economy and the enslavement of people on which this depended. We know less about Jamaican society and very little about the material culture and consumption practices of its inhabitants. Drawing on a unique dataset of c.10,200 probated inventories, this project will offer the first large-scale analysis of domestic material culture and consumption in Britain’s wealthiest and most important colony.  The research findings will be shared through a range of academic outputs, and with public audiences in Britain and Jamaica. Central to this is an online and interactive visualization of “typical” eighteenth-century Jamaican homes and an associated exhibition, to be constructed in partnership with the National Museum of Jamaica.